* The steady erection of a system of minority rule that Republicans are implementing is not as dramatic as a populist putsch. But it’s actually happening before our eyes. And it’s led not by the rabble-rousing president or the unwashed masses who thrill to his rallies, but by the elite network of donors, operatives, and politicians who run the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr

17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP

In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.

* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.

* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.

In the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.

* Medieval studies groups say a major conference is trying to limit the number of diverse voices and topics. The debate is part of a bigger fight over whether medieval studies should remain a fundamentally European field. Whose Medieval Studies?

5/ And once you go on to read about the assets of the other justices—Gorsuch's net worth is in the neighborhood of $10 million, Breyer's is about $16 million—you can see what a scandal little ole' Brett, with his $15k in savings and his $200k in credit card debt, really is.

* Asylum seekers, even those who do not present themselves at points of entry, are not “illegal”; under international law they are “irregular” and subject to an array of rights and protections, including immunity from punishment.

* The way it works is that, once the first settlers on a new planet demonstrate that they won’t die horribly from allergies, pathogens, or getting buried under the excrement of herds of titanosaurs, they then spread out to build mining settlements all over the planet, high-grade all the most accessible mineral deposits, drill for oil, and grow the infrastructure needed to build starships. With starhips built and trade links established, they grow into a mature colony over the course of a few centuries, all the while founding as many daughter colonies on new planets as possible. Eventually, they run into serious pollution problems, loss of usable mineral deposits, changing climate (both natural through the equivalent of Milankovich cycles, and anthropogenic), and a biosphere that coevolves to exploit the colony, because that’s just what life does (think pesticide resistant bugs, coyotes, superweeds…). At that point, the colony starts to fall apart. Interstellar trade shifts away from it (after all, whatever’s causing them to collapse them might be contagious). Ultimately the survivors hang on to become a truly resilient indigenous population in a backwater world–or all die horribly as their critical infrastructure fails. Their fate doesn’t matter to our interstellar civilization, because it has literally already moved on to new frontiers, boldly going where no man has gone before. So long as they can find new worlds to conquer, they can go on forever.

Wizards in Harry Potter fought a war over whether they should be genteel and cultured about racism but vulgar about everything else or vulgar about racism and genteel and cultured about everything else.

The figureheads of the war (Harry Potter and Voldemort) were mostly divorced from the larger cultural context of the sides they inspired or led. Their motivations were personal: Harry wanted revenge and to protect people he knew personally, Voldemort wanted power to live forever.

The couple’s son-in-law is a sergeant in the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division. According to the family, the Department of Defense won’t let him intervene in the case.

“Most worrying is the fact that both parents have recently undergone surgery and need medication,” the report said. “The Silvas say they have gotten calls from their mother, who said she was denied her medication. They say they have not heard from their father.”

This is a different army base in Brooklyn than the one that called ICE on a pizza delivery guy a few weeks ago.

1. You really want to know what grinds me gears about a good portion of "the resistance?" We are literally going through the early stages of ethnic cleansing, yet people are urging that we play chess against an opponent that has flipped the board over & set the house on fire.

Still astounded by the people arguing that the Puerto Rican government has a moral responsibility to funnel all of its money to bondholders rather than making basic services work as hurricane season begins

1/7: We are now in a transitional moment: as was the case internally for people in the Soviet system c.1980, most people in the West who today are involved in or thinking about the int’l system realize that the warm & fuzzy things that are said about this crumbling system are BS.

Whenever I get irritated with young people for incomprehensible weirdness like calling crispy duck pizza racist or watching videos of people playing computer games, I feel it's important to remember that old people voted to burn down the economy and put babies in prison.

Why isn’t every editorial board, every media head, every member of Congress demanding the regime give access to where girls, toddlers and babies are being held? It’s over a week now. What is Trump hiding?!

* In a proposal that could bring the uproar over President Trump’s controversial “zero tolerance” immigration policy to the Bay Area, the Navy is considering converting a shuttered Concord naval base into a detention facility to hold up to 47,000 immigrants apprehended at the southern border, according to a draft memo obtained Friday by TIME.

First, you're never going to win a head on battle with an adversary that's got you outgunned. That's not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs.

Seven, be very careful with whom you trust. Snitches and compromised individuals are everywhere. My Dad was arrested because of a snitch. His friends weren't so lucky, the Gestapo machine gunned the cabin they were in without bothering to try and arrest them.

When the Gremlins take over Clamp Tower, they provoke a state of emergency. In this situation, a sovereign is allowed by law to violate the law, it is "legal illegality". In these moments the true nature of the law is revealed – we see the CEO, Clamp, leading a SWAT team.

* It’s a little after nine o’clock. Hal’s sons stop sipping their lattes and the oceanographic scientist behind me puts down his handful of M&M’s. If Hal Wanless is right, every single object I have seen over the past 72 hours – the periodic table of elements hanging above his left shoulder, the buffet currently loaded with refreshments, the smoothie stand at my seaside hotel, the beach umbrellas and oxygen bars, the Johnny Rockets and seashell shop, the lecture hall with its hundreds of mostly empty teal swivel chairs – will all be underwater in the not-so-distant future.

"If the study of intellectual history is to have any ultimate justification, it is its capacity to rescue the legacy of the past in order to allow us to realize the potential of the future." -Martin Jay

* But anyone with a modicum of utopian imagination should be asking, what are the opportunities secreted within this emerging network of control? When older forms of democratic possibility are being foreclosed or rendered obsolete, what new (and perhaps better) possibilities can be found? How can the emerging order, which has thus far depended so much on deliberately produced ignorance, and on keeping its political allegiances occulted, be politicised?Utopian thinking beyond Brexit.

* In their different ways, Mayer, Haffner, and Jarausch show how habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness make terrible things possible. They call attention to the importance of individual actions of conscience both small and large, by people who never make it into the history books. Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.” It Can Happen Here It Happened Here 18 Months Ago.

Once when I was about three, my family accidentally boarded an skyscraper elevator without me. We were separated for no more than a few minutes. I still remember how scared I was. Anyway, Trump is a fucking monster.

this little girl is the same age as my daughter. luna is the happiest thing. the funniest girl. and she is absolutely terrified to look around and realize she is too far away from us, even for seconds. the fear she would feel here fills me with rage and sadness. pic.twitter.com/riSV8ADRFe

Seeking asylum is not illegal; it is a right guaranteed under international law. It’s the Trump administration that is acting illegally — by their own admission — by enacting punishments against asylum seekers. Everyone who is a party to this action is a criminal.

The US government chaotically shuffling thousands of children it has kidnapped from their parents through a series of inadequate temporary shelters has a small number of very predictable outcomes, all of them extremely terrible.

Time for that sad reminder. After Robin Williams' suicide, sensational media coverage that violated the CDC guidelines resulted in a 10 PERCENT increase in suicides. Same effect applies to mass shootings. Newsrooms, please be considerate in your coverage. https://t.co/O5Gy81rSP0

Republicans who claim the president can commit literally any crime without consequence either during (no indictments) or after (self-pardon) office are saying they do not consider this country a democracy + do not accept any limit other than their own will to power. Believe them!

Recent scrutiny of investment practices by the University of Michigan is raising concerns about conflicts of interest and ethical lapses at colleges and universities seeking to increase their endowments.

Questions about Michigan’s investment practices were prompted by an investigation by the Detroit Free Press, which found that a large portion of the university’s nearly $11 billion endowment is invested in private equity, hedge and venture capital funds, and real estate investment firms run by top university donors and alumni investment advisers.

* Below are the two main written versions of Sojourner’s speech, the original, on the left, was delivered at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on May 29, 1851. The full text of each speech follows the synopsis below so you can see the differences line by line. I have highlighted overt similarities between the two versions. While Frances Gage changed most of the wording and added the southern slave dialect to her 1863 version, it is clear the origin of Gage’s speech comes from Sojourner’s original 1851 speech.

The first hints these elusive particles turned up decades ago. But after years of dedicated searches, scientists have been unable to find any other evidence for them, with many experiments contradicting those old results. These new results now leave scientists with two robust experiments that seem to demonstrate the existence of sterile neutrinos, even as other experiments continue to suggest sterile neutrinos don’t exist at all.

* The District of Columbia is considering legislation to lower the voting age to 16 (something some localities already allow for local elections only). Bills are pending in California, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico to lower the voting age to 17 for primary or general elections.